Every time you worry about a negative prediction somebody made about your life instead of optimizing your energy to prevent the outcome, you may be feeding it instead.
If you know what you are looking for and how to shift it in your favor, you can stop pouring fuel on it.
Who were the Friends?
From 1982 to 1991, the Monroe Institute ran something called the Explorers program. An Explorer would go into a booth with headphones and a microphone, drop into a deep meditative state, and talk with the monitor in the studio. One Explorer, a woman named Marie Coble, recorded up to 232 hours of sessions. The group she channeled went by the Friends, and they described themselves as an organized energy outside of physical creation.
In 2019, Daniel Erickson, who met the Institute's archivist, Susan Smily, during his Gateway program, started helping her summarize those sessions, and these lines come from Dan's summaries.
What did the Friends say about attention?
In a session on September 7, 1984, the summary reads: "Attention is like a currency, where your attention is focused your energy flows. Whether that attention has good intent or bad it is still attention energy." A few days later, on September 12, they said thought forms "seek out energy (your emotional and focused attention) to exist."
A thought form, in their sense, is an idea that has picked up enough energy from people paying attention to it that it starts to act like it has a life of its own.
Then, on September 9, came the part about the future. They were asked: "There is an anticipation for some major changes to the Earth experience; can you comment on this?" The summary of their answer reads: "When a prophet brings an idea, and it gains strength it becomes its own thought form. The thought form becomes conscious and will play upon the energies of man. These predictions will occur for those who expect the projections." The summary goes on to ask whether the work at the Monroe Institute has an influence, and answers: "Yes, your thought forces are just as powerful as the other forces." So a question about the coming Earth changes got the answer that predictions come true for the people who expect them, and that the people at the Institute could push back on those thought forms to shift or negate them.
If the Friends are right, the person who made the prediction may not have seen the future at all. They may have simply witnessed a snapshot of the energies present that could make a potential future come about, and instead of saying so, misinterpreted it and reported it as fact, as an outcome set in stone. Everyone who heard it and kept expecting it may have built that future together without meaning to.
The occultist Dion Fortune put it this way in The Mystical Qabalah in 1935: "It is well known to mystics that if a man meditates upon a symbol around which certain ideas have been associated by past meditation, he will obtain access to those ideas, even if the glyph has never been elucidated to him by those who have received the oral tradition 'by mouth to ear.'" A glyph is a drawn symbol, which could be anything from a representational image to a sigil. She meant the Tree of Life, which she said held "what generations of meditation had ensouled therein."
Clif High, who ran forecasting software on internet language for years, reads the connection the other way around. In a 2016 report, he called the unusual words his software flagged "leakage of future," language he says shows up in what people write before the event happens. So for the Friends, the forecast makes the event, and for High, the event leaks back into the forecast. In both versions, what people pay attention to and what ends up happening are tied together, and the attention and focus that people apply to the information are the link.
What did the sociologist say?
Robert K. Merton was born Meyer R. Schkolnick in South Philadelphia in 1910, and according to his New York Times obituary, as a teenager he did magic tricks at birthday parties under the stage name Robert Merlin, until a friend told him the wizard's name was hackneyed and he changed it to Merton. (So yes, the man who explained how belief makes things come true started out as a magician.)
The Times also called him "the father of the focus group," which marketers use to test which messages people will believe. He published an essay in The Antioch Review in 1948 called "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy." He defined it as "a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true."
His best-known example was a parable about a bank in 1932. The bank was solvent. Then a rumor went around that it was failing, enough depositors believed it, and they lined up to pull their money out. A healthy bank went under because a rumor said it would, and the rumor was wrong until the depositors made it true. (Merton made this particular bank up, but anybody who lived through the bank runs of the early 1930s didn't need him to.)
Merton would say the depositors' behavior did it. The Friends would say it was their attention. I don't think you have to pick one, because in both versions the prediction only comes true after a lot of people spend a lot of time focused on a particular outcome.
My personal opinion: That's a good reason to be picky about which predictions you keep repeating to yourself, no matter who made them, because every one you hang onto gets and keeps your attention whether it was accurate or not. And your belief in it can create a pathway to its manifestation.
How do you take your attention back from a prediction?
Write the prediction down, word for word, and who said it. On paper, it's a lot easier to see as one person's guess. Then, cross it out and write down what you prefer to happen instead as though it has already occurred.
For one day, notice every time your mind goes back to it. Each time, reframe it in the positive by moving your attention on purpose to what you wrote that you want to happen instead, and picture that for a few seconds as if it has already happened. Feel the emotions you would feel if you were already living inside of the desired outcome.
Stop repeating the prediction to other people in the negative way that you would not want to experience it. Every retelling hands it more of the attention the Friends talked about.
Try the one-day attention switch and tell me in the comments how it went. Did your mind go back to the prediction less often by the end of the day, or more?
If you're tired of living out versions of your life that were not what you wanted to choose to experience, come pick your own at Shift Your Timeline on Sunday, November 29, 10 AM to 7 PM Eastern, live on Zoom. Over five Hemi-Sync journeys, you go from deep rest to Focus 15, a state outside of time. That's where you choose the timeline you most want. Registration closes Saturday, November 28.
Register for Shift Your Timeline by clicking here.
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